Sometimes when we’re hunting we look at a map or the sign-out board and figure, “Eh, why not? I’ll hunt that old barn by the cutover and see what happens.”
Sometimes it pays off. Sometimes you come back to camp and wonder why you didn’t choose another stand.
Matt Moss had one of those moments back on Dec. 29 when he and his brother headed to their hunting land in Mississippi. The drive from Lake Charles, La., took a while and by the time they got there, it was just about time to hit the stand for an evening hunt. He picked a stand just because he wanted to hunt it, but with no particular reason. It was just a, “Eh, I’ll go there” kind of decision.
Good decision. Moss took his .45-70 rifle “because it’s light, and I could carry it up and down the tree stand easier,” he told Mississippi Sportsman. Moss is a student at the LSU-Shreveport Medical School. Getting into the woods is a nice break.
He might want to study up on “adrenaline rush” after killing his giant buck. The bruiser came into a small clover patch looking for does and then hit the woods again. Moss took a shot at about 40 yards with his rifle, found blood when he got to the site and called his brother to come help.
Then they found a jaw-dropping stunner of a buck that had six points on one side with some sticker kickers around the base. The other side includes two main beams, one of them more than 25 inches long. It gross scored 216 6/8 inches and would be among the largest non-typical bucks ever reported killed in Mississippi.
“Another club member has a shed from him, and we believe that it was a typical deer last year, and this year he became a nontypical and grew an additional 40 extra inches,” Moss said in the report. “We’re not exactly sure what happened.”
What an amazing buck! The ride home probably wasn’t as long as it seemed, either!
Learn More About Hunting Bucks in All Phases of the Rut and Improve Your Success!